In Denver on Thursday, the former Rhode Island congressman and son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, made an absurd claim. According to The Denver Post, he said marijuana legalization “slipped under the radar” both in Colorado and Washington and that organizations bent on countering the idea didn’t have time to mobilize. As a result, voters “didn’t know what their stake was in the debate.”

Kennedy is free to claim that Colorado voters didn’t understand the issues as well as they should, because that’s a matter of opinion. But “slipped under the radar”? Amendment 64 got huge amounts of publicity precisely because its favorable polling prompted the media to take it seriously.

For that matter, Coloradans hardly walked unprepared into the debate. For the past four years they’ve observed public policy unfold regarding medical marijuana dispensaries – at the federal level as well as at the legislature and many town halls. They’ve had loads of time to consider what the proper legal and regulatory status of marijuana should be.

And as Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project reminded me today, parts of Colorado have “been having a pretty significant discussion about marijuana policy” even longer, at least since “Denver became the first city in the world to approve a measure removing all penalties for marijuana possession” in 2005. Tvert estimates “there have literally been upwards of 1,000 print and TV news stories in the state [on policy affecting marijuana] in just the past few years.”

And Amendment 64 supposedly slipped under the radar?

This was not an isolated claim by Kennedy, either. He earlier told the Boston Globe much the same thing in explaining why he was now committed to opposing pot legalization. “I can’t stand by and let this move forward without any kind of debate or questioning,” he said. “This thing could pass right underneath the radar and we will wake up one day and say what were we thinking?”

Actually, you could argue that a serious debate over legalization has been going on nationally, too, for many years – at least among policy wonks. What’s different about the debate in recent years is that those favoring legalization have begun to achieve the upper hand. Kennedy may deplore that, but he can’t plausibly argue it’s because no one has heard his side. In Colorado and Washington, voters most certainly heard it, but were simply no longer as inclined to agree.

Is Gov. John Hickenlooper — former microbrewer and bar owner — a hypocrite for opposing the ballot amendment to legalize and regulate marijuana? It’s a common theme among amendment proponents, and it’s wrong.

That’s not to say Hickenlooper’s arguments are beyond reproach. In his announcement opposing the amendment, for example, he took up the anti-Amendment 64 campaign’s presumably poll-tested theme that the measure threatens our children even though they’d of course be barred from possessing it just as they are today.

Children’s welfare is a legitimate debating point, no doubt, but it’s cynical for the opposition to make it the principal focus of their attacks.

The “vote ‘no’ on pot” editorial was sanctimonious grand-standing on the part of The Denver Post. To actually state with assumed authority that the efforts by SAFER are “merely an effort to enable marijuana users to get high on something besides alcohol” serves to disguise a social justice problem that dwarfs The Denver Post’s concern. That problem is the arrest and conviction records of those who commit no law-breaking behavior other than to want to get high. If getting “high” is the concern of the editors, then why aren’t they proselytizing for making alcohol illegal? Read more…

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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